Breaking it down at the various price points, we've got to give the edge to NVIDIA by default at the $300 mark, simply because we're still trying to get our hands on a 256MB Radeon X1800 XT card. If today's performance with Oblivion is any indication, these X1800 XT 256MB cards could become pretty hot sellers once they hit the market en masse, especially considering the shortage of GeForce 7900 GT cards on the market right now. In any case, the GeForce 7900 GT delivers good performance in Oblivion, besting the GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB in nearly all cases, and outperforming the GeForce 6800 GT SLI setup as well.

Moving up to the highest end of the market, ATI's Radeon X1900 XTX takes the performance crown in our testing with Oblivion in single-card configurations. Regardless of the test with threw at the X1900 XTX it came out on top, with the Radeon X1900 XT typically finishing a close second.

When testing dual-card configurations, the results swing dramatically in NVIDIA's favor. In multiple cases the X1900 XTX CrossFire and X1800 XT CrossFire configurations yielded a negligible performance increase over comparable single-card configurations, while the GeForce cards clearly scaled well in Oblivion once running in an SLI configuration. (We also noted tearing and other artifacts from time to time with the CrossFire setup.)

This is one area where NVIDIA really excels in comparison to ATI - their dual GPU infrastructure is more mature than ATI's at this point. We have no doubt that ATI's hard at work on getting CrossFire support for Oblivion better integrated into their Catalyst drivers, but NVIDIA's got SLI up and running with Oblivion beautifully out-of-the-box today. We've stated in the past that ATI needs to add customizable game profiles for CrossFire into their driver (similar to what NVIDIA's done today with their SLI game profiles), the need for this is clearly illustrated by Oblivion. Until ATI does this, CrossFire users are forced to rely on ATI's driver team to add support directly to games. This is one huge drawback CrossFire has in comparison to SLI.

Update: Fortunately we just received word from the Catalyst Maker himself, ATI's Terry Makedon, on how to get CrossFire up and running with Catalyst 6.3: by renaming the Oblivion.exe executable to "AFR-FriendlyD3D.exe" CrossFire performance scales appropriately. All isn't perfect with this workaround -- we did notice quite a few flashing textures as a result -- but at least it provides a solution for ATI CrossFire users today without having to wait for Catalyst 6.4.